Clinicians in acute care settings always have a certain awareness or “context” about the patients they care for. For example—clinicians know who their patients are, why their patients have been admitted into the hospital, what medications their patients are taking, who the other responsible caregivers are, what rooms and beds their patient are in, and the current vital signs and lab results for their patients.
All of the following are considered examples of contextual-care data elements usually necessary for clinicians to provide safe and effective patient care.                Patient ID        Location (room/bed)        Diagnosis        Results        Current vital signs        Medications list        Allergies        
When clinicians interact with a specific patient (for example when they perform a task or procedure) they require additional “patient-centric” context in order to ensure accuracy and patient safety. As an example—when administering a medication, a nurse requires context in order to determine—is this the right patient, is this the correct dose for this patient, is there an order for this medication for this specific patient, is the patient allergic to this medication, etc.
There are two critical elements related to patient context and contextual care that must be considered:                Process Automation and Clinical Workflow—the specific work processes that are performed at the patient's bedside must be safe, as efficient as possible, and able to obtain all relevant contextual information in real-time.        Enterprise Application Enablement—In order for enterprise applications to be enabled to consume patient-specific point of care information, there must be an efficient process established and implemented to ensure the proper patient context is created and maintained for the medical devices that produce the patient information (i.e. vital signs data, alarms, device status information). Most medical devices in use today have no context about which patient they are connected to, which location (room/bed) the patient is located, or which caregiver is present at a given time (such as when a caregiver is performing a task or procedure).        
In order to improve health management, information systems have been developed so as to manage the administrative, financial and clinical aspects of a hospital. In this respect, two information systems are generally interconnected: a Clinical Information System (CIS) which concentrates on patient-related and clinical-state-related data, and a Hospital Information System (HIS) which keeps track of related clinical and administrative issues.
There is currently an increase demand for improvements in patient point of care so as to avoid errors such as patient misidentification, wrong medication and false medication administration recording.
As for instance discussed in the paper “Positive Patient Identification using RFID and Wireless Networks” by Aguilar, der Putten and Maguire (Health Informatics Society of Ireland, 11th Annual Conference and Scientific Symposium, Dublin, Ireland, November 2006), various patient identification methods in hospitals have been proposed in order to improve upon current safety procedures. In particular, a handheld-based patient identification system has been proposed wherein each patient is given a RFID wristband and the clinician (nurse for instance) uses a RFID reader to read the patient's wristband and identify the patient.
Still making use of RFID technology, it has been proposed in US 2007/0267475 to implement a per-patient device that automatically detects and logs patient encounters with items (such as medical devices, drug containers, clinicians) with the benefit of not requiring that a clinician manually triggers a system to scan for or detect the item. The per-patient device may communicate with the Clinical Information Systems (CIS) so as to ascertain if a detected medical device, drug or the like has been approved or ordered for the patient.